Database DevOps: Techniques for Safely Evolving Production Databases

Data, the way that we process it and store it, is one of many important aspects of IT. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision-making. For our DevOps strategy to be truly effective we must be able to safely and quickly evolve production databases, just as we safely and quickly evolve production code. Yet for many organizations their data sources prove to be less than trustworthy and their data-oriented development efforts little more than productivity sinkholes. We can, and must, do better.

If database evolution isn’t an explicit part of your DevOps strategy then you’re not really doing DevOps yet, are you?

Outline/structure of the Session

This presentation begins with a collection of agile principles for data professionals and of data principles for agile developers - the first step in working together is to understand and appreciate the priorities and strengths of the people that we work with. Our focus is on a collection of practices - the "agile database techniques stack" - that enable development teams to easily and safely evolve and deploy databases. These techniques include vertical slicing, clean architecture and design, agile data modeling, database refactoring, database regression testing, continuous database integration, and configuration management. We also work through operational strategies required of production databases to support a Disciplined DevOps strategy.

Learning Outcome

Discover why it can be very challenging adopting agile strategies within the data management space

Target Audience

• Data professionals wanting to learn how to support DevOps; Agile developers wanting to learn how to address database issues in their DevOps strategy; IT management who want to adopt DevOps within their organization

Scott Ambler - The Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile: Business Agility for Established Enterprises

schedule 5 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes. This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It briefly examines the state of mainstream agile software development and argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. We then explore what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level. We then work through what it means to strategically scale across your IT organization as a whole and discover what a Disciplined DevOps strategy looks like in practice. Your Disciplined Agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. The talk ends with advice for how to make this challenging organizational transition.

James Gifford - Descaling the Enterprise Instead of Scaling Agility

schedule 5 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session, we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success. Focusing in on topics ranging from

Organization designs used by WL Gore, The Dunbar number

Delivery Triads - Product, Delivery, Technical Excellence

Venture capital style funding

Focusing on business value

The second half of the session is a workshop focused on creating a Value Stream Container and resource based on team funding

James Gifford - 5 Metrics to Create Safety and High Performing Teams

schedule 5 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

Jess Long - Found In Translation - Building Alliances Through Analogies

schedule 5 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

This will be a live example of how to use life events and analogies that are relatable to the fundamentals of Scrum. I will walk through my own personal backlog of living on the water and tie the trials and tribulations of such back to a Scrum Model. The details I share will be described in parallel to concepts that resemble a host of Agile themes. The intent is to have the audience consider some of their own personal experiences and how they can use those in future conversations to overcome challenges or resistance around transforming their model.

One short activity is facilitated during the presentation that engages the audience. This is intended to emphasize the importance of getting to know your audience and highlight the repercussions of relying on assumptions.

John Le Drew - Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Over 3 months John recorded over 75 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics:

What is safety?

What are the elements that make a team effective?

Is psychological safety the foundation to team performance?

What can we all do to help foster psychological safety in our teams?

What is the relationship between safety, stress and engagement?

What is the profound impact of a lack of safety and engagement on society?

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 75 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

Jess Long - Kaizen Land - Gamifying Stand Up and Overcoming Anti Patterns

schedule 5 months ago

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40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

Pradeep Nadgir / Sriram Natesan - Is Agile Working?

schedule 4 months ago

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60 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Large companies (Banks, Insurance, and Telecom) in our community have been on their Agile Transformation journey over the past 4 to 5 years, implementing Agile in various pockets of the organization. Leaders have made significant investments of time and money on this journey and are now facing the challenge of articulating tangible benefits of the transformation and would like to measure the efficacy of the transformation.

Basically, they are asking Is Agile Working?

While there is no one simple answer to this seemingly innocuous question, we have from our experience working with these different clients devised a process that has helped us with answering this question.

In this session, we would like to share the three step process which we hope will help you.

Firstly, we start with identifying the personas in the organization who are asking the question. And in our experience, we have identified (at least) four major personas that work for this scenario.

Secondly, we identify the business objectives and outcomes that these personas want to achieve. This involves multiple workshops and sessions with these personas to identify their objectives and outcomes.

Finally, we introduce a 3 * 3 matrix based on the organization lens (personas) and the maturity of Agile capabilities in the organization

The three step process identified above has proven to work irrespective of the industry it is being used in and provides a comprehensive and structured way to answer the important questions that an organization faces during the transformation. This process and the accompanying tool provided enable executives to make data backed decisions on the areas to focus on next in the transformation.

schedule 4 months ago

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60 Mins

Experience Report

Beginner

A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

There are lots of common challenges between technical operations and public transit operations. Public transit is a staple system in any city's infrastructure that helps to flourish the economy of the city. They have tried-and-tested runbook-type systems in place to deal with standard operations, and how to deal in times of incidents. Sounds pretty much like what technical operations teams have to deal with on a regular basis, right?

In this talk, we present some parallels between operating & running a public transit system that can be implemented at operations teams at software organizations. We will look at technical as well as simple organizational-behvaviour aspects that can be rolled out to increase operational efficiency at organizations, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Why is improving Ops important and often left out of agile enablement?

The world of infrastructure & operations is usually not looked at when enabling agile teams from a product management perspective. Most agile enablement process don't look at Ops early. All too often, we see the "throw over the wall, run it & figure it out" behaviour in organizations. The good news is... this behaviour is changing, slowly, but steadily, thanks to the DevOps movement.

There are lots of good literature out there on increasing operational excellence in technical organizations, however, in such a fast world, are leaders getting time to actually learn & reflect on tactics to enable themselves? Can there be easy takeaways that teams can implement starting tomorrow?

Yes they can!

By carefully seeing how a public transit system, such as the TTC, operates, there are lots of areas we can incrementally improve in Ops at our organizations.

Jess Long - Empowering Performance Through Servant Leadership

schedule 5 months ago

40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

This session is focused around leading your teammates toward success over managing them off a cliff.

Most of us who have had the pleasure of coaching a scrum team have adopted the mindset of servant leadership. But what about directors and middle management?!

Do you have teammates reporting to you who work on Scrum teams that you’re not part of?

Do you report to a manager that might as well be on another planet?

If you answered YES to either of these questions, this session is for you. We’ll talk through the shift of leading over managing and how we can use the framework of the retrospective as a tool to bridge gaps, manage performance and promote transparency. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or individual contribution, the values and mechanisms we review can be brought back to your organization.

schedule 4 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Challenges - legacy mainframe systems:

As organizations with mainframe assets and infrastructure move towards becoming truly agile, they need to tackle the challenge of slow manual software development and deployment as well as rising MIPS costs associated with automation testing on target hardware. The challenge comes along with the fact that mainframe applications lack modularity, which makes the development process slow and even small code changes risky. Mainframe release processes are also very complex, manual and cost inefficient which take hours or days.

Agile enablement through Dev-Ops Pipeline:

As part of a PoV investigation, we explored the potential opportunities offered by a new stack of modernized IBM z Systems mainframe Dev-Ops tools. Dev-Ops tooling can enable agile development on IBM Z Systems mainframes through collaboration and interaction among mainframe COBOL developers, test & QA teams, and IT operations professionals maintaining the on premise IT infrastructure. It increases speed of continuous integration (CI) & continuous deployment (CD) on mainframes, improves quality of code through shift-left testing and automated delivery pipeline, and lowers overall costs because of fewer quality problems and software rollbacks.